British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was forced to deny having specifically timed his recognition of a Palestinian state for after President Donald Trump leaves Britain at his joint press conference with the American leader on Thursday.
The United Kingdom government of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is due to join France and a handful of other Western nations in recognising Palestine as a state later this week, barely hours after President Donald Trump flew out of London from his two-night state visit hosted by the King and Queen. While The Daily Telegraph had claimed the timing of recognising Palestine was deliberately delayed for after Trump goes “amid concern it could dominate their joint press conference”, the topic was still broached at their bilateral talks.
Responding to a press question, President Trump made a rare deviation from his usual broadly positive attitude towards Britain and its government to remark: “I have a disagreement with the Prime Minister on that score, one of our few disagreements, actually”.
Actually, it is perfectly clear that Starmer and Trump have plentiful disagreements, even if the lid is generally kept on them for the sake of cordiality, so President Trump spelling it out even this gently may be a sign of significant displeasure.
Starmer specifically denied the timing of the Palestine move while standing besides Trump on Thursday, refuting that using those few days between the end of Trump’s visit but before the U.N. General Assembly next week, was anything but coincidence. He said: “On the question of recognition, I made my position clear at the end of July on timing which ahs nothing to do with this state visit”.
While it is abundantly clear Starmer’s government has incurred the displeasure of the Trump administration in following France into recognising Palestine, President Trump also congratulated Starmer and smiled over other comments on Palestine.
Starmer said: “Well let me be really clear on Hamas. They’re a terrorist organisation who can have no part in any future governance in Palestine… Hamas of course don’t want a two-state solution, they don’t want peace, they don’t want the ceasefire. So I’m very clear where I stand on Hamas.”
President Trump responded “that’s good” and clapped Starmer on the shoulder, in an expression of what may have even been relief.
Starmer has previously faced accusations that his rush to recognise Palestine is as much about internal party management than matter of principle. Yet the splinter faction from his party of ultra-Palestine loyalists in Parliament has already seemingly collapsed into in-fighting and obscurity after only weeks of existence, stripping away this alleged impetus to act.
As previously reported, Israel has decried the United Kingdom’s move to recognise Palestine as a state and has likened the move to “rewarding” Hamas for the October 7th attacks. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a British podcast that it would be unthinkable for the British government to apply the same standard as it does on Israel to others, or itself:
Building a hypothetical attack scenario where Hamas killed a proportional part of the British population in an attack as they had in Israel, which he said is “tiny, the size of Wales”, Netanyahu asked: “Let’s imagine, what would be the response of Britain if in your case about 15,000 people, or 10,000 people would be butchered in one day. And you’d have, I don’t know, 2,500 hostages taken. You know, would you say, ‘Oh, well, we should give our attackers a state right next to London?’ Of course not.”
He continued, expanding the example from an Israel of ten million people to the United States with 340 million and saying: “What would the Americans say if they had 50,000 Americans butchered, and thousands and thousands of Americans taken hostage. Obviously they’d say no, we’re not going to give them a state… right in Manhattan. It’s ridiculous. The standard that is being applied is not merely wrong, it’s just downright dangerous. Because you’re really rewarding these monstrous terrorists with the greatest prize and that’s because of weakness. It’s weakness in the face of distorted media, packed social networks, packed with bought bots.”
Again directly addressing UK Prime Minister Starmer, Netanyahu asked: “You should ask Keir Starmer, here’s a suggestion. What do these protesters say about Britain?… [Hamas supporters] burn Israeli flags, they burn American flags, and they burn the UK flag. They are basically a hostile minority supporting monstrosities, and I think it’s shameful the way Western leaders in Britain, in France, in Canada, New Zealand, the way they buckle under. Europe has gone through the destruction of the Jews, 80 years later that’s what they have to say? They attack the Jewish state, and they give a price to those who would destroy the one and only Jewish state? Shameful.”
Read the full article here